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Community Information Systems
March 23rd, 2006
Mission Restatement
I’ve developed a mission statement for Think New Orleans. I’m going to restate the mission a number of times while I blog, so I can find something that is punchy.
Think New Orleans is a
non-profit organizationcommunity effort whose mission is to help New Orleans communities share information in such a way as to maximize the reach through syndication and search indexing.
Or more simply…
Think New Orleans is all about getting New Orleans soaking wet with Google juice.
I have to find a million ways to say it. It has to be the same thing every time.
Syndicating New Orleans
We’re now working on turning the Think New Orleans blog into a group blog for community organization.
The organizers of the FQTH and L9 Homeowners, Jimmy Delery and Rep. Charmaine Marchand, have been working with me to organize their communiciation online, and movng foward, to create an online record of the decisions in meetings.
Christian Roselund has been digitally recording these meetings. Pending the delivery of a compact flash digital audio recorder, I’m going to fan out with and gather more audio.
The audio is an important service for those who have to choose between relevant meetings, or for those who have to miss meetings due to their busy post-Katrina lives.
Diaspora Volunteers
Learning to blog is not a precondition to community participation.
As I did in Ann Arbor, I’m going to maintain an e-mail list that will serve as a work queue. If a community organizer wants to share information, they can e-mail it, with attachments, to the work queue, and a volunteer from the NOLA bloggers can put the posting in place. The blogging volunteer is at liberty to punch it up with links to relevant articles.
This division is important. People in New Orleans are overwhelmed and simply don’t have time to learn new software.
They will never see the benefit of syndication, because it will be too long in coming.
It is far more important the community organizers and citizens communicate in the high-bandwidth, high-signal, low-noise medium of face to face conversation.
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Comments 
Serious:
Think New Orleans is a non-profit organization whose mission is to help New Orleans communities share information in such a way as to maximize the reach through online syndication and search indexing.
Not so serious:
Think New Orleans is all about getting New Orleans tagging wet with Google juice.
I’m getting a lot of interesting feedback.
First, from Vince Keenan, I need to make clear that Think New Orleans is an “effort”, not an organization. I am working on that, of course.
Secondly, Vince felt that a lot of the words are destined to lose meaning. He didn’t know what syndication ment, and to quote his e-mail, “It feels like one of the new vangaurd of appropriated words that will ultimately be meaningless (see virtual).”
I do seem to be able to get the message across to people that I encounter at community meetings.
My friend John Gregory suggested, at lunch, “To realize the power of syndication for good.”
A mission statement is a tricky thing.
[...] I’m working on the Think New Orleans mission statement. This is necessary for me to apply for an association with an existing non-profit, unnamed at this point, making Think New Orleans an initiative of that non-profit. I once posted the mission statement on my personal blog, but I’m going to have get serious about this, and have it sound a lot less marketoid. I’m looking for your help in this matter. Keep in mind that this is my project, however. I can’t write a mission statement that is unable to carry me through months of unpaid work. Civic Blogging, Mission Statement, New Orleans, Think New Orleans [...]